Word: shamus
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...much sense out of the plot, either. He has all he can do to keep his actors from tripping over corpses. In addition to the ravishing Jacqueline Bisset, who appears as a rather tricky temptress, and Houseman, whose air of hothouse gentility is persuasive, Charles Bronson makes a pleasing shamus out of St. Ives. No big thing, mind. But he eases through the part with gruff grace and a few hints of low-rent charm. In Breakout, last year's Hard Times, and now here, Bronson has turned in good, engaging work. It is getting nice to have...
Twenty years after his last bow, the paradigm of detective-as-Lochinvar is still Raymond Chandler's incorrodable shamus, Philip Marlowe. He was, of course, a total fiction. As Chandler admitted, "the real-life private eye is a sleazy little drudge... a strong-arm guy with no more personality than a blackjack. He has about as much moral stature as a stop-and-go sign...
THIS, MAYBE, is the latest incarnation of the American private i., aged past the primed '40s and sagging benignly into dotage, yielding his sleek hide and tough aspect to crowsfeet and innocence. Transplanted from the big bad city and the crass apparatus called technology, the shamus is hiding out in Cape Cod, cloaked as a gracefully-aging police chief who abhors modern development...
Fatal Accident. The adolescent here is a runaway heiress (Melanie Griffith, daughter of Actress Tippi Hedren) whose obviously devious mother hires the shamus to find her. The search introduces him to plenty of colorful company, notably a movie stunt man, before he finds the girl holed up with a shabby stepfather and his mistress (Jennifer Warren) on the Florida Keys, where they manage a dubious-looking sea and air charter service. A traumatizing accident-or is it murder?-shocks the girl into docility and a return home where, doing extra work in a movie, she herself suffers a fatal accident...
...Cartwright, move over. NBC'S Columbo, the disheveled shamus portrayed by Peter Folk, has joined ranks with Bonanza and I Love Lucy reruns as one of America's top TV exports. Now shown in 75 countries, the series has just been voted Japan's most popular television show in a poll conducted by the Japanese TV Guide. Falk's international success has not come smoothly, however. When Rumania's state TV network ran out of shows, fans of the raincoated detective began to protest, and the beleaguered network cabled Universal Studios for temporary relief. Said...